Tag Archives: vocabulary

Writing about puns got me thinking about homonyms, which made me think of The Homonym List. My little sister was a math kid. She used to put pictures of the math books she had finished in the photo cover of her school … Continue reading →

“It’s so pretty! Wow, it’s so beautiful! Look at that, it’s so pretty! Isn’t it beautiful? Oh, PRETTY!!!” That was me, age ten, hiking with my family at Mt. Rainier. “It’s just so beautiful. Oh wow, it’s so pretty!” This … Continue reading →

English is missing a word. (Well, probably many words.) However, this is a really useful word: it’s a gender-neutral singular pronoun for people. In the good-old-boy days, they just said “he” but that’s not cool anymore, nor should it be. … Continue reading →

So I was teaching my students about the word root of the word human a while back. You guys, it’s really cool. Did you know that the words human, humble, humus, hominid, humility, and humiliate all come from the root … Continue reading →